Andy: Project 1

Note 1: Here are the two constraints I used in running my searches: I used the Google search engine. I used three terms, two fixed and one variable, "premediation+grusin+variable" (I included "grusin" as a term after receiving results for punk lyrics and other off-track results). In listing my results I'll refer only to the variable term that I plugged into the search string, the highlighted words are links to the searches.

Note 2: I ran two broadly-themed searches based on my interests. The first focused on architecture and issues of collective consciousness in spaces. The second was aimed at the ideas of new media and emergence as well as my recent fascination with (computer) viruses.

1: Architecture
Basically nothing came of this search. "Architecture" as a term is most often used as a synonym for framework. However, Grusin does talk in his article about imagining possible displays of terrorism and in doing so protecting ourselves from the shock when they happen. I wonder about how the Bush administration's notion of security/preparation gets manifest physically as in the TSA queues at airports and metal detectors at high schools. More intimately, how can a study of Detroit serve as some sort of desensitization through premediation in the sense that it has been devastated by a number of issues like economics, labor, and race. What I'm imagining is a adding Detroit to other cities that have been damaged by other factors: energy issues, lack of water, environmental destruction, and political or religious issues. Together these real-world "worst-case" scenarios encompass a lot of the possible outcomes for "post-apocalypse" cities thereby creating a "premediation cloud" and also giving some ideas to the movie industry for destruction movies that don't all include tidal waves.

2: Public space / Public sphere
"Public sphere" brought up a blog that talks about premediation in the sense that it is when "a prescripted event is brought into public knowledge ahead of time to ensure support for the venture." The blogger further connects this to Chomsky's idea of manufacturing consent.

3: Environment
Here's a great search result for the 3rd ed. of Human Geography. It includes a quote by John R. Stilgoe talking about the word "landscape": "A landscape happens not by chance but by contrivance, by premediation, by design; a forest or swamp or prairie no more constitutes a landscape than does a chain of mountains. Such land forms are only wilderness, the chaos from which landscapes are created by men intent on ordering and shaping space for their own ends. But landscapes always display a fragile equilibrium between natural and human force; terrain and vegetation are molded, not dominated. When men wholly dominate the land, when they shroud it almost completely with structure and chiseled space, landscape is no longer landscape; it is cityscape, a related but different form. Landscape is essentially rural, the product of traditional agriculture interrupted here and there by traditional artifice, a mix of natural and man-made form."

4: Emergence

It seems like a lot of the uses of premediation are towards things like politics, security, and socio-cultural issues, etc, essentially elements that relate to how we cognize and create future developments in our world. I am interested in how premediation can be used address our connection to the physical landscape. The obvious usage here would be how do the spaces we interact with in a repetitive manner influence, determine, or premediate our responses to them. And if we reverse this condition, how do inhabitants’ reactions to and understandings of a space premediate how it is used, evolves, or decays? Of course, there is a well-known connection between people and their spaces, however, where I see premediation fitting in as a way of describing in a more concrete manner how that relationship works.

5: Swarm
This return a cool blog called Default Settings. There's a post on premediation and a vlog of Grusin, but also of interest is post about Alexander Galloway's "latest project, an online version of the Game of War. This is a ‘remake’ of a board game created by French Situationist Guy Debord in 1978, a somewhat forgotten departure by the filmmaker and writer so closely associated with the Paris riots of 1968." A great question from Galloway here is, "If there are games that simulate the swarm-like behavior of the distributed network, do these provide any clues as to how progressive this organizational form is, or can be?" Nice.

6: Virus
From this search came up with a text by N. Katherine Hayles, "Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia," which is in the collection, "First Person: New Media as story, Performance, and Game." She says, ""Synamatic," a homophsone for cinematic, perhaps alludes to the Symantic (semantic) Corporation, creator of the Norton Anti-Virus and Norton Utilities, in a conflation that implies computer health is integral to the reproduction of screen image and therefore to subjectivity. "Communification," which can be read as a neologism conflating commodification and communication, arises when the circuit is completed; that is, when humans and intelligent machines are interconnected in a network whose reach is reinforced by naming the few exceptions "detached" machines. "

7: Viral
I am interested in issues like emergence, swarm intelligence, and most recently, viruses. These conditions, to varying degrees, raise issues like agency and collective consciousness. In an article by Samuel Nunn, "Tell us What's Going to Happen," he says, "Cells learn from mistakes, and react tactically to anti-terrorism measures. There is a viral aspect to this: mediated representations of successful crime and terror attacks can inform real criminals and terrorists of vulnerabilities and strategies."

In a recent conversation with my sister (an oceanography grad student at Univ. of Washington) we ended up on the topic of viruses from a book I was reading called “The Exploit” by Thacker and Galloway. In it, they ask offhandedly whether a (computer) virus is alive. My sister’s response (that of a biologist) was explicitly, no. Viruses fail to fulfill the criteria of living organisms. How does this relate back to premediation? My most fruitful search was “premediation & viral.” This got me to thinking about the effervescent and compounding nature of premediation. How does a concept of critical mass (or something like viral load) fit into this discussion? From Grusin’s article it sounds like the-more-the-better in terms of possible outcomes. I wonder, then, how this relates to the life cycles of viruses. Do viruses, like humans in the Matrix multiply endlessly until their resources are consumed as opposed to arriving at a state of equilibrium? This makes me wonder about (premediated) states of perpetual rising action vs. states of relative balance in terms of predictions about the future and their relative proximity and importance to the masses/group/collective.